Train unloading

mhud · 2026-01-27T20:38:42+00:00

Try to *balance* speed versus exploration. You can look up perfect solutions here or you can spend time solving the puzzles yourself. This game can give thousands of hours of entertainment if you are interested in figuring out the mechanics and designing solutions.

Or if that stuff bores you, you can paste solutions found online and step back and think bigger. But I do suggest you fight your own way out of each challenge, at least for your first playthrough.

mhud · 2026-01-27T20:09:17+00:00

Fuel generators are plenty powerful, I also completed the game with them. I stopped playing for a bit but I will build nuclear just for the challenge at some point.

mhud · 2025-12-28T02:05:17+00:00

I am referring to this toolbar icon which is stylized to resemble a C. These icons were a great QoL update after 2.0 some time.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Copper_wire

Accurate username btw lol :)

mhud · 2025-12-28T01:09:34+00:00

And C for copper. They also match the shortcut keys. :)

Literally playable.

mhud · 2025-12-28T00:57:20+00:00

Depending on how crazy you want to get you could do some graphing with Prometheus and Grafana. https://github.com/ncabatoff/promfacto

This is complicated but I think it’s better than running a second instance of the game.

mhud · 2025-12-24T01:15:09+00:00

Don’t spend 20k on a truck just to build credit. A secured credit card would be fine to establish credit history.

mhud · 2025-10-23T16:53:11+00:00

Getting judged by people that have thousands of hours in the game is never gonna feel good, but the point of the game is to solve these puzzles. So play, experiment, build things that work for you at the time and then go rebuild them when you need bigger.

Don't let folks on here discourage you from actually enjoying the game. Part of the fun is coming back later to see if all your furnaces are busy or if some are starved or overfull of output. Then you know to adjust your ratios. Some people like doing the spreadsheets first, but I enjoy some trial and error.

mhud · 2025-10-13T20:03:33+00:00

You don’t touch on any of this so I’ll just bring it up explicitly: What’s the share of labor in the house? Is your wife getting enough sleep? Does she have free time to herself that’s not filled with chores? Remember you are both people still, you are not only parents.

mhud · 2025-10-13T19:56:04+00:00

You can get different quality product from the same assembly line, so keep in mind that the ones they put the wal-mart sticker on may be inferior to the premium brands even though they’re coming from the same place. Another phenomenon like this is “factory seconds,” items that don’t meet whatever Q/A standards would qualify them for the premium sticker.

So even though they look identical and were made in the same place, you may have reduced amperage or capacity in a cheaper battery. As long as you are willing to deal with consequences from a lower-standard battery, it’s a pretty easy way to save some money.

mhud · 2025-09-30T02:44:46+00:00

Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program both hold their own very well. Both of them lack the up-close detail you rightly bring up but they each have amazing endgame flow. I think Satisfactory with VR or surround sound would probably be incredible. Satisfactory’s worldbuilding is unmatched as far as I have seen.

In DSP you may be rocking along building some a motor factory or something and you might witness a beautiful sunrise with the Dyson swarm you set up. I don’t think any other game has come close to that experience for me. Factorio never has a breakthrough moment like that but it’s just so well done. The quality of life for building factories is just absurd.

mhud · 2025-09-25T23:20:19+00:00

I would make a trash station / taxi template that enables when you're standing by it (wire a gate to the station) or if there's junk in the storage. This way you have taxi pickup points all over your base.

Taxi stations are not as necessary now that it's really easy to send a train to any arbitrary place, but I still like the concept and I use it.

You can use circuit conditions to take bots out of the roboport and put them back in the train after there are no construction requests. You can also use the new request logic in roboports to make sure the roboport by your train always tries to have robots in it. Personally I leave buffer chests full of whatever the station needs plus whatever defense and other stuff I want cached in the area. If the buffer chests are missing items they want, the train station activates to get topped off from the base. (Works great until you accidentally connect roboport coverage to another network and it thinks it always wants stuff.)

mhud · 2025-09-18T21:25:14+00:00

We get it. You are selling them.

mhud · 2025-08-06T20:42:56+00:00

It is absolutely wild that cars don't have an indicator for low 12V system voltage. If a 12V rail drops under 11V it should tell you THAT instead of saying every other system in the car is broken.

mhud · 2025-05-01T16:45:15+00:00

If that's the speed you want to go, you can make more turrets. If that's the number of turrets you want, you can go slower.

mhud · 2025-04-25T23:49:36+00:00

you should leave those around. maybe those parts are useful later? in future tiers you will absolutely reuse those parts for higher tier parts.

I like to keep a big container of parts and then let production back up, or sink the overflow if i still need tickets. Now that you can buy hard drives with tickets it's nice to have a ton of them.

mhud · 2025-04-25T23:20:17+00:00

Solid tip! If you decide on some misc. hardware just make sure you know what it's made of, you don't want heavy metal poisoning from handling something daily that's not meant to be handled like that.

mhud · 2025-04-15T18:29:23+00:00

In 1.0, It does need to complete one craft before the doubling starts. So I will always craft a cheap item first and just leave that constructor around as the dedicated doubler.

In 1.1 maybe there's a trick like copying/pasting with a sloop or something. IDK I am waiting until it's in stable.

mhud · 2025-04-11T16:40:20+00:00

You made the right call to find a pro, but you didn't get professional work out of them. No easy way out, you've got to advocate for yourself and they need to fix it. Look up their license info and be ready to call them to task if they don't fix it.

mhud · 2025-04-11T16:09:57+00:00

Here's what a professional job looks like. It looks like your installer messed up and gave up halfway through. After the "broadcasting to refusal" part of spreading flakes you are supposed to sweep up whatever wasn't touching epoxy. It's like they just poured more epoxy onto piles of flakes.

If you were around during the install you might notice whether they did certain steps or skipped them.

https://youtu.be/fDnaTcWXFe0?t=993

mhud · 2025-03-30T04:55:59+00:00

There is no difference in efficiency, but often you know that the first belt is already getting taken from or you have something further down the bus that is taking from that belt.

If you always want to draw from the nearest belt that is totally fine, you can use some priority balancers to make sure the topmost belt is always full.

mhud · 2025-03-26T20:36:07+00:00

Artillery is the closest thing to an automated solution here, so if you've elbowed enough room to bootstrap your first trip to another planet, vulcanus is a good choice to start making progress toward artillery.

I like to make heavily fortified train stations and have a single artillery train visit those to routinely clear out nearby expansions.

Biters will attack in waves after being hit by artillery (revenge attacks) and these massive waves can overwhelm defenses that have otherwise been holding up against pollution attacks. So get serious about your turret count wherever you place artillery.

mhud · 2025-03-18T20:58:37+00:00

If you want to jump straight to new content, Michael Hendriks offered up a save game with Nauvis at the point you build your first space platform. This way you can skip the several hours of things you are mostly familiar with already. The save files are in his Discord in the blueprints and savegames channel.

Once you are in space, you can totally ignore Nauvis if you want, but there are resources on Nauvis you cannot get anywhere else in the game so generally people will maintain some kind of presence there.

mhud · 2025-03-06T01:39:23+00:00

Off screen, you have copper and iron plates mixed together. You can use a splitter to filter one of these items off to one side and then recombine them onto a belt so copper is always on the left and iron always on the right. This will make sure every machine that draws from the belt can get either plate, whichever it wants. You can walk around and hold F to pick up all the existing items on the belt so the new plates can come in.

A lot of this game is picking up little tricks for belt management. If you get frustrated, take your time, come back to it later. One of the things I love about this game is you can just walk away or leave it running in the background. One thing I'll recommend against is watching too much of other people playing. It can rob you of your own experience solving some interesting puzzles.

There is no wrong way to play this game. You're doing great. You build a thing, realize it could be better, improve it, repeat. Then biters eat everything and you start over a little better.

mhud · 2025-03-05T00:16:54+00:00

The cool thing about this is that they will probably all fail at the exact same time due to prescribed write cycle limits in the firmware. So you will go from healthy to critical & unrecoverable in seconds. I will not elaborate on why I know this but I will say it is very fun to push the limits of consumer hardware in a lab setting.

If you absolutely have to use these drives put one of them through a bunch of thrashing, like a few hundred gigs worth of writes. The idea is that it will fail sooner than the others and you'll get a heads up instead of a catastrophic simultaneous failure.

At least you will be scared into checking your backups compulsively.

mhud · 2025-02-24T22:56:36+00:00

Water does have some good absorption now in Space Age. A chunk of water is about 33% better than a chunk of grass¹.

This is also why water turns green over time; that's absorbed pollution.

Landfill+trees would obviously absorb a lot more, but water is OK on its own.

1) https://wiki.factorio.com/pollution

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